Najat Vallaud-Belkacem Is the Youthful New Face of France

Following the Paris terrorist attacks, it fell to a young Muslim education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, to reassert her nation’s core values.

“Reconciling the irreconcilable” is how France’s 37-year-old education minister and the mother of young twins, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, describes the challenge of balancing a high-stakes government career and a fulfilling personal life. Ask her who her political heroes are, and she says she doesn’t have any. “I’ve never been able to find someone who can combine the two.” Then she starts to laugh. “I’m thinking of Wonder Woman.”

The series starring Lynda Carter?

“Yes,” she says, smiling. “It rocked my childhood.”

The first woman and the first Muslim ever to hold the education post—one of the most influential in France—Moroccan-born Vallaud-Belkacem has swiftly become a political celebrity here, named “the new face of France” by the international press, who view her as a symbol of a changing and diversifying country. As the spirited and forceful spokesperson for François Hollande’s divisive presidential campaign, then his minister of women’s rights, she is used to a bright spotlight. However, in the past three months, the attention and the scrutiny directed at her have intensified. Following January’s terrorist attacks in Paris, it was Vallaud-Belkacem who stepped forward as an important voice on the left—addressing the roots of the violence and the critical role schools play in steering young people away from extremism.

The day she receives me in her drafty wood-paneled office at the education ministry on Paris’s Rue de Grenelle, she is dressed with typical polish, in a dark skirt and a formal navy blazer, her hair cut in an Audrey Hepburn pixie crop, a fur stole around her neck. And she’s in an upbeat mood—a luminous smile, a hint of mischief in her eyes—which is surprising given that she has just been through what was surely one of the most fretful periods of her ministerial career.

On the morning of January 7, Vallaud-Belkacem was holding a staff meeting to prepare for the school year ahead when news broke of the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. She spent hours in a frenzy of activity. Schools had to be locked down as a manhunt for the attackers got under way; a letter of instruction to all teachers, calling for a minute’s silence in every classroom, was sent out; and a flood of questions from worried parents had to be patiently answered by school administrators. When Vallaud-Belkacem finally returned home—she and her husband, Boris Vallaud, who is President Hollande’s deputy general secretary, live in an official residence adjoining the ministry—she discovered that the couple’s six-year-old son, Louis, had been following that day’s terrible events on television.

“He had stayed home because of a high temperature,” she says. “His grandmother, who was looking after him, had wanted to stay informed, which meant that he had assimilated all the news.” When Vallaud-Belkacem spoke to Louis, whose twin sister, Nour, was at school that day, he began using words that were new to him, like terrorist, attack, and murder. “That was hard,” she says. “Did I explain everything to him about what had happened? No. I’m like all parents who try to shelter their children. But the truth is children are confronted by so many harsh images.”

There was more harshness to come: reports that Muslim teenagers in several French schools refused to remain silent to commemorate those killed, creating a surge of indignant media attention focused squarely on the education ministry. Incidents were reported of students’ expressing sympathy with the attackers or believing the shootings had been staged—that Israel or the U.S. was somehow behind what had happened.

Under pressure to show decisive leadership, Vallaud-Belkacem moved swiftly to announce a €250 million plan to train students in traditional French values. Moral and civic lessons would become compulsory. “La Marseillaise” would be taught and sung. Starting this fall, students and teachers will have to sign a charter to leave religious convictions outside the classroom. Coming from a young Muslim minister, an immigrant who had herself grown up in a poor suburb, it was a forceful statement about assimilation. “We know that if religion is allowed into schools,” she tells me, “pupils will sometimes begin to question the teaching they receive.”

The announcement made headlines around the world and was judged by many to be exactly what the unsettled moment demanded—an indication that secularism would remain firmly at the core of French identity. By email, Pres­ident Hollande described the qualities Vallaud-Belkacem brought to a moment of national emergency. “I knew Najat Vallaud-Belkacem long before becoming president of the republic. I knew about her commitment, which has not faltered since she joined the government. The battles she fought yesterday she leads today while never failing to put her convictions and loyalty above everything else.”

Vallaud-Belkacem’s childhood home was an isolated farmhouse with red earth walls and a thatched roof in the mountainous Rif region of northern Morocco. Her earliest memories are of gathering water from the nearby well with her older sister, Fatiha, now a lawyer living in Paris, and helping their grandfather tend to his flock of goats. Her father, Ahmed, had immigrated to the northern French town of Abbeville before she was born, and when Vallaud-Belkacem was four he found a job with the French car manufacturer Renault and sent for his wife and two daughters to join him. Settling in a suburb of Amiens, some 80 miles north of Paris, Vallaud-Belkacem felt the full shock of a new culture. She didn’t speak a word of French and remembers being stunned by the vast number of cars—a vehicle she had rarely seen before.

“The fact of leaving one’s country, one’s family, one’s roots, can be painful,” she says. “My father had already found his place, but for us, for my mother, it was very difficult to get our bearings.”

Her father set strict rules: Vallaud-Belkacem and her sister were forbidden to flirt with boys or to go out to nightclubs before the age of eighteen. Not one to rebel aimlessly, Vallaud-Belkacem poured all of her energy into her studies, reading constantly and reaching fluency in French by the end of her first year. (Her favorite moment of the week was when the bibliobus, or mobile lending library, pulled up to her block.) Her parents would go on to have another three daughters and two sons—seven children made for a boisterous household. “My sister and I learned to be independent and resourceful very quickly,” she remembers.

‘If religion is allowed into schools,’ she says, ‘pupils will sometimes begin to question the teaching they receive’

Vallaud-Belkacem received French citizenship shortly before enrolling as a law student at the university in Amiens. It was there that she stumbled on a prospectus for the prestigious Institut d’études politiques de Paris (often known as Sciences Po). A teacher discouraged her from applying, saying it was out of her reach, but she took the entrance exam anyway and passed. She worked two jobs while earning her master’s in public administration—and met Boris Vallaud, then a fellow graduate student, while studying at the institute’s library. The two married in 2005 and have followed similar paths into government. (“It’s very nice to have a husband who moves in the same world as I do,” she says. “The downside is when you go home in the evening, you end up talking shop. But he gives me good advice—and he’s a wonderful father.”)

Her life took its decisive turn toward politics while she was on a vacation in Spain in 2002, when she read that the National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen had done unexpectedly well in that year’s presidential election and would face then-president Jacques Chirac in a runoff. Vallaud-Belkacem had long been conscious of intolerance on France’s far right. The only time her parents had shown any interest in politics was to scold Le Pen whenever he appeared on television—and to see him come so close to the presidency galvanized her. She returned to Paris, joined the Socialist Party, and found a job working as an adviser to the mayor of Lyon; she later ran for councillor in the region and won. She included in her 2012 memoir, Raison de plus!, an account of an election-campaign dinner she hosted at which she greeted a guest and took his coat, only to find him looking around for Mme Vallaud-Belkacem. “Still today in our society a young woman with dark skin who opens the door in a bourgeois area has to be a servant,” she wrote. “I molded myself against le Front National,” she tells me about her early days in politics. “Against hate speech, be it racist, sexist, xenophobic, or homophobic. Against the kind of injustice I faced during my own life.”

“Her ascension has been interesting,” says Audrey Pulvar, a journalist and former television host who participated in an animated political debate with Vallaud-Belkacem on the popular show On n’est pas couché. “She’s a woman in a country where politics has been largely confiscated. Politics in France has always been a white man’s business. You rarely see women or people of diverse races in positions of power.”

“She’s stayed very much the same person I knew from the beginning, with a huge thirst for life,” says her friend François Pirola, a civic organizer who has known Vallaud-Belkacem since her Lyon days and later advised her as minister for women’s rights. “And she has very solid nerves. That’s something that no one can teach you. You either have them or you don’t.”

Those nerves were on display from the moment she became Hollande’s minister for women’s rights. She quickly became a target for the right, who criticized Hollande for elevating someone with dual nationality in his government (Vallaud-Belkacem has never relinquished her Moroccan citizenship). Racist and sexist attacks proliferated on Twitter and Facebook as she pushed through laws aimed to promote greater gender equality, including rules to reduce salary discrepancies between the sexes, to strengthen punishments for domestic violence, and to force outstanding alimony payments. The reforms “caused a lot of ink to be spilled,” she acknowledges. “We were even accused of wanting to confuse the sexes, which is nonsense.” Then, shortly after Hollande made her education minister, a right-wing magazine called the appointment a “provocation” on its cover. Another ran a photograph of her under the heading L’ayatollah.

Friends rallied to her defense. “My friend Najat Vallaud-Belkacem is the object of vile attacks,” tweeted business magnate Pierre Bergé. “She is an admirable woman and will be an excellent minister of education.” Vallaud-Belkacem, who describes herself as a “nonpracticing Muslim,” dismisses the incidents. “Their stock-in-trade is to be racist and xenophobic,” she says of the magazines. More troubling was a forged letter that circulated on the Internet in which she supposedly advocated the enforced teaching of Arabic in French classrooms—a claim that was repeated by high-level government officials. “These types of ideas become common currency on social media, where everybody’s word is put on an equal footing,” she says. “That can lead to extremist ideas being spread around.”

The minister has made it clear that she wants to shake up the French schooling system, which, she says, tends to reinforce entrenched gender roles. What she is less comfortable with is the idea of being a symbol or figurehead for racial diversity, though she readily acknowledges the need for greater representation of ethnic minorities among the country’s elite. “It’s true that some people often tell me that I should promote my origins and express myself in this way, but I’m the education minister for the whole of France,” she says. “If I want to convey the republic’s values to children—namely, liberté, égalité, et fraternité—I have to embody this ideal which says that what you become has nothing to do with the color of your skin.”

This is why the period following the Paris attacks so bolstered her public standing—because she did not turn her back on a hard-won heritage, on traditionally French values, including the constitutional right to blaspheme. “A satirical press is part of our culture, inherited from the French Revolution,” she says. “Am I attached to the freedom of the press? Very,
very much so.”

“She has common sense,” says Dominique Moïsi, a political commentator and professor at Sciences Po. “She has an undeniable charm, and she’s clearly a very good politician precisely because she gives the impression that she can learn from others and that she doesn’t have all the answers. She’s intelligent enough to appear modest.”

Vallaud-Belkacem won’t predict what lies ahead for her after Hollande’s term ends in 2017, when he could well stand for reelection. She will say that life is so busy she barely has a moment for the things she loves: spending time with her twins, attending the odd tennis match at Roland Garros or a French national-team soccer game. “She has two years left to show what she can accomplish,” says Pulvar, who believes firmly that France’s schools need further reform. “We’ll have to wait and see, but I think she has a big political career ahead of her.”

Moïsi considers her a potential counterweight to a rising far right. “There’s a dark new face of France, which is Marine Le Pen,” he says, referring to the daughter of Jean-Marie and the current president of the National Front. “But Vallaud-Belkacem is the smiling, open, and modest face. She incarnates the possible success of integration in France.”

“I don’t see being a politician as a career plan,” the minister says about her future. “I see it more as a chance. It’s not a blank check, in other words. You actually have to deliver.”